Case Study

OYO

Converting a discount model into a premium story.

Industry
Hospitality
Stage
Growth

OYO is a powerhouse hospitality-tech company founded in 2013 by Ritesh Agarwal to address the lack of affordable, quality hotel rooms in India. Before OYO, budget travelers had few...

OYO is a powerhouse hospitality-tech company founded in 2013 by Ritesh Agarwal to address the lack of affordable, quality hotel rooms in India. Before OYO, budget travelers had few reliable options, often staying in unfamiliar, locally-owned hotels with inconsistent standards. Discovering and booking these properties was difficult, and the overall experience often fell short.

OYO was built on the belief that everyone deserves access to quality travel experiences, no matter their budget. To make this a reality, OYO partnered with local hotels, helping them meet standardized customer experience promises. The company also developed proprietary software to streamline hotel operations and enhance the guest experience.

Despite its rapid growth, OYO faced challenges due to confused perceptions of the OYO brand, the hotel network under-delivering on customer expectations, and a portfolio that cannibalized its own business.

OYO invited COLLINS to help them re-imagine the brand and rationalize its portfolio, setting the company up for its next stage of growth.

Our work began with an immersive, two-week journey across India, staying at OYO properties from Mumbai to Goa to Delhi. We conducted in-person ethnographies and engaged with local culture to gain a deep understanding of the OYO experience. During strategy workshops with OYO leadership, we identified that OYO not only enables geographical movement but also inspires personal growth through travel and new experiences.

Together, we developed a brand, creative system and portfolio architecture that reflected this. The new identity was dynamic and adaptive, designed to be welcoming for newcomers while remaining familiar to loyal customers.

As a result of our work, OYO’s portfolio was streamlined, eliminating internal competition between properties. This led to a 46% increase in per-room revenue.

COLLINS
Dashiell AlisonBen CrickBrian CollinsJump JirakaweekulBryna KeenaghanAntonia LazarEmily MorrisBrian OkarskiErik Berger Vaage
OYO
Maninder GulatiMonika HolodNishant JayaswalNeha SharmaMotherland

Augments

Augments are add-on components or properties that enhance a design system’s performance. They introduce new capabilities, expand functionality and improve how the system works across contexts.

Augments

Augments are add-on components or properties that enhance a design system’s performance. They introduce new capabilities, expand functionality and improve how the system works across contexts.

Motion Signature

A signature animation style that transforms static brand elements into instantly recognizable kinetic expressions. By creating a consistent motion language, it amplifies brand distinctiveness, deepens recall and makes digital experiences more captivating and memorable.

Endurance Function

Because a brand accrues power over time, we engineer our identity systems to be both timely and timeless. Our designs avoid fleeting trends, favoring bespoke visuals and timeless principles.

Validated Versatility

We pressure test our designs across every touchpoint and context—from app tiles to billboards, screens to swag. This rigorous performance testing ensures that your brand remains consistent, recognizable and effective everywhere it lives for as long as it lives.

Flex Deck

A logic function embedded in the identity system to ensure brand coherence across diverse applications—critical for any high-performance system, as research shows coherent brands are 2.1 times more likely to achieve salience.

Culture Sync Logic

A logic of function that encodes into the system the ability to localize while preserving global identity. It ensures expressions remain culturally authentic and consistently recognizable.

Custom Pattern

This modular pattern system flexes to unify the brand ecosystem across—scaling seamlessly into marketing graphics, wayfinding, architectural elements and even ceramic tiling. Its geometric logic ensures clarity, consistency and brand recognition in every environment.

Grid

A structural system enforcing consistency and adaptability across an enormous decentralized identity system. Our Grid for OYO is inspired by Massimo Vignelli’s intuitive, durable Unigrid—bringing similar clarity to OYO's global complexity.

Impact

Increased Portfolio Clarity

Rationalized a sprawling sub-brand system into a coherent architecture, helping customers better navigate and book across 157,000+ hotels.

Reduced Portfolio Cannibalization

By streamlining sub-brands, we eliminated internal competition, clarifying offerings and improving yield across OYO’s properties.

Improved Premium Tier Differentiation

Created clear, tiered naming and visual systems, strengthening pricing power and elevating premium hotel offerings within OYO’s platform.

46%

Growth in Revenue Per Available Room

Improved clarity across OYO’s portfolio helped drive a 46% increase in RevPAR.

Reduced Booking Friction

Simplified brand hierarchy and naming conventions, reducing consumer confusion across digital touchpoints and improving conversion funnel performance.

Rolled Back Brand Bloat

Eliminated unnecessary sub-brands and overlapping property categories, improving marketing efficiency and operational clarity across regions.